The Birth of the Internet
The Internet, originally the ARPAnet (Advanced Research Projects Agency network), began as a military computer network in 1969. This network was an experimental project of the U.S. Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).Other government agencies and universities created internal networks based on the ARPAnet model. The catalyst for the Internet today was provided by the National Science Foundation (NSF). Rather than have a physical communications connection from each institution to a supercomputing center, the NSF began a "chain" of connections in which institutions would be connected to their "neighbor" computing centers, which all tied into central supercomputing centers. This beginning expanded to a global network of computer networks, which allows computers all over the world to communicate with one another and share information stored at various computer "servers," either on a local computer or a computer located anywhere in the world. In 1986, came the birth of the National Science Foundation Network (NSFNET), which scientists across the country with five supercomputer centers. Universities were early users of the Internet. In 1992, the Internet was still primarily used by researchers and academics. In 1995, large commercial Internet service providers (ISPs), such as MCI, Sprint , AOL and UUNET, began offering service to large number of customers.
The Internet now links thousands of computer networks, reaching people all over the world. See thisAtlas of Cyberspaces for graphical images of networks in cyberspace.
Since traffic on the Internet has become so heavy, some of the scientific and academic institutions that formed the original Internet developed a new global network called Internet 2. Known as the Abilene Project, and running on fast fiber-optic cable, it officially opened for business in February, 1999 at a ceremony in Washington, D.C.
George Mason University is one of 150 universities in the United States that are working on the Internet 2 project with industry through the University Corporation for Advanced Internet Development (UCAID) to improve the functionality and capabilities of the Internet. The network's 2.4 gigabit-per-second speed started with a transmission speed of 45,000 faster than a 56K modem.
The Birth of the WWW
1990 - Tim Berners-Lee, currently the director of the World Wide Web Consortium, the coordinating body for Web development, invented the World Wide Web. He occupies the 3Com Founders chair at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science. The WWW was originally conceived and developed for the high-energy physics collaborations, which require instantaneous information sharing between physicists working in different universities and institutes all over the world. Now the WWW is used by people all over the world, children and adults, for personal, commercial, and academic uses. Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau wrote the first WWW client and server software, defining Web addresses (URLs), hypertext transfer protocol (http) and hypertext markup language (html). Here is Tim Berners-Lee's original proposal to attempt to persuade CERN management to initiate a global hypertext system, which Berners-Lee called "Mesh" before he decided on the name "World Wide Web" when writing the code in 1990. In December 1993, Berners-Lee and Cailliau, along with Marc Andreesen and E. Bina of NCSA, shared the Association for Computing (ACM) Software System Award for developing the World-Wide Web. The graphical Web browser, Mosaic, evolved into Netscape.
The WWW is based on the hypertext protocol.